Louis Charles-Joseph Blériot (1872 - 1936)

Auguste Louis Blériot (b.July 1, Cambrai, France 1872; d. August 2, 1936), graduated from École Centrale Paris with a degree in Arts and Trades and went into business manufacturing automobile headlamps.

At 30 he taught himself to fly, in an aircraft of his own design. His skills as a pilot and designer improved by trial and error. He made his first flight in 1907 at Bagatelle, France and in two years his aviation company was producing aircraft known for their quality and performance.

Louis Blériot became famous for being the first to fly an aircraft across the English Channel. On July 25, 1909, in his Model XI 25 horsepower monoplane from Les Barraques, France to Dover, England. This 22 mile, 40 minute flight won for him the much sought after London Daily Mail prize of 1000 pounds sterling.

In the 1914-1918 War his company produced the famous S.P.A.D. fighter aircraft flown by all the Allied Nations. His skill and ingenuity contributed to the advance of aviation technology in his time, and popularised aviation as a sport. He remained active in the aviation industry until his death on August 2, 1936.

Frenchman Louis Blériot successfully crossed the English Channel on July 25, 1909 in a small, 25-horsepower monoplane of his own design. He beat rival Hubert Latham, who had aborted an attempt six days earlier following engine failure, and won the London Daily Mail prize of 1,000 pounds for the feat.

Blériot amassed a modest fortune inventing automobile lights and accessories before becoming interested in aviation. Initially he experimented by towing gliders over the Seine River and progressed to designing airplane models.

The Daily Mail offering prompted Blériot to attempt the crossing. He established a headquarters near Calais, France and waited for the poor weather conditions to break. When he noticed a slight drop in the winds he quickly readied the frail "No. XI" for flight. At 4:35 a.m. he took off into the murky sky and headed northward in the general direction of England.

Blériot leaving Calais

unauthenticated image

Alone in the craft, Blériot had no compass or instruments. Over the middle of the Channel he was unsure of his position, but held to his course. Finally the chalky cliffs of Dover appeared.

After an erratic and perilous flight of about twenty-three miles, Blèriot landed near England's Dover Castle thirty-seven minutes after setting out. The dramatic event revealed the airplane's revolutionary potential to the people and governments of the world, effectively ending England's "island impregnability."

A hero's welcome into London, July 25, 1909

Blériot built aircraft for the French government during World War I and played a role in developing commercial aircraft after the war. Considered "the father of the modern monoplane" and "the pilot of the first epochal flight", he died a forgotten man in 1936, his contributions buried by an avalanche of progress in flight.

At the first light of dawn on the morning of July 25, 1909, Frenchman, Louis Blériot gave his crew the signal to release his small wood and fabric Model XI aeroplane. It crossed the grassy paddock and bounded into the air crossing the cliffs at Sangatte France, near Calais, and ventured out over the English Channel.

Blériot mid Channel during the crossing on July 25, 1909

Travelling at just over 40 miles per hour, and at an altitude of about 250 feet, the little monoplane out-paced its naval escort ship, the Escopette, which carried his wife Alicia. Within minutes Blériot was on his own over the channel and due to weather conditions could not see either coast for part of the flight.

Finally, thirty-six minutes after his departure, fighting dangerous cliff-side gusts, Blériot put down on English soil near Dover Castle. It must have been a dramatic scene for the small group of on-lookers as his plane dodged several brick buildings, was tossed about in the wind, and as Blériot cut the motor the craft dropped into a grassy field smashing the propeller and undercarriage.

Blériot before the crowds arrived?, July 25, 1909

Person holding the flag is also in other images taken on July 25

Blériot and his wife Alicia pose for publicity photograph July 26, 1909

Louis Blériot (1872-1937) was born in the north French town of Cambrai. He studied engineering, and went on to make a small fortune manufacturing headlamps for the booming automobile industry. He had been involved in aviation since 1900.

His great passion rapidly ate into his wealth, however, as he built and crashed planes with undiminished enthusiasm! By 1909, though, he had developed a reasonably airworthy monoplane, his No. XI. The trouble was that its engine had never run for more than 20 minutes without overheating and stopping.
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Blériot began his lifelong obsession with aviation when he visited a local exhibition and saw Clement Ader's early, bat-wing shaped plane. Inspired by the strange looking craft, he began to build, test, and crash numerous planes of his own over the next nine years.

Rather than follow one type of design for his planes, Blériot worked by trial and error - working first with gliders, then box-kite biplanes, and finally with monoplanes.

By 1909, with his finances drained, Blériot finally produced a plane which didn't immediately crash, the Blériot XI.

In a marketing ploy to increase its circulation, the "Daily Mail" newspaper of London offered a cash prize to the first pilot to fly across the English Channel - a risky proposition at the time. Blériot sensed this was his golden opportunity. Even though his plane had never run for more than 20 minutes - about half of the Channel's 22-mile distance - the pilot remained undaunted.
Blériot had two fierce rivals for this title. The first was the daring Hubert Latham, an Englishman who had made France his home. Loved by both the French as well as the English, he was favored to win. The other flyer, Charles de Lambert, was a Russian aristocrat with French roots - not to mention one of Wilbur Wright's best students.

In July of 1909, the three competitors each arrived on the shores of Calais, France. Latham had arrived first and attempted a crossing on July 19th. Six miles from shore, though, he developed engine trouble and was forced to make a sea landing.

Meanwhile, Lambert suffered a major crash of his own during a test flight, forcing him to withdraw from the race. Blériot, himself, experienced the misfortune of a badly burned foot when he a petrol line broke during one of his trial runs. But Blériot persevered.

While Latham was regrouping, Blériot watched the weather. At dawn on July 25th, he took off for England despite blustery winds and his injured foot. By the time Latham's camp realized that Blériot was not making a test run but attempting the crossing, it was too late to chase him. With no compass to guide him, Blériot beat the odds and managed to somehow successfully cross the Channel. He immediately gained worldwide fame. His rival, Hubert Lathan, even re-attempted Blériot's flight four days later, only to again smash his plane into the ocean when the engine failed.

The New Colossus of Rhodes

While Blériot's flight was not the longest of its time, his achievement was nonetheless historic. His crossing captured the world's attention and continued to popularize the field of aviation. After his famous flight, Blériot formed a plane company which became quite successful, first manufacturing copies of his Blériot XI, and later producing the S.P.A.D. fighter flown by the Allies during WWI. Louis Blériot would continue to make contributions to the field of aviation until his death on August 2, 1936.

In 1909 Blériot, in a Type XI, became the first to fly across the English Channel, flying from Calais, France to Dover, England on July 25th.

Both a designer and a pilot, pioneer French aviator Blériot was still on crutches from a previous crash when he made this flight of 21 miles in 38 minutes- through fog and mist, without a compass. This airplane was powered by an Anzani engine, similar to that on the Bellanca.

Anzanis were known to have problems with overheating, and had Blériot not flown through a passing rain shower, thus cooling his engine, he might not have completed his historic flight. Like almost all planes of this early era, bank was controlled by warping the wings.

In 1913 a Blériot piloted by Adolphe Pégoud was the first aircraft to be flown in sustained inverted flight. Landing gear consists of simple bicycle wheels and rubber bungee cord shocks.

Thanks to Louis Blériot's sensational flight across the Channel, the Blériot Type XI became one of the most popular pre-war aircraft. Blériot gave up competition flying, at the request of his wife, and concentrated on restoring the family's bank balance. He set up a factory to manufacture the XI or 'Channel crossing type' as it was often known and sold licences to other firms. A brand new Blériot XI cost £400 in 1909.

Blériot XI

The first XI flew on 18 January 1909 (with an unsatisfactory R.E.P. engine) after being displayed at the French Aero Show in the Grand Palais, Paris. The XI did not have ailerons, as many of Blériot's earlier designs had, but instead used wing-warping to control bank. The elevators took the form of pivoting panels at the wing tips of the tailplane. (The red tapes in the colour picture below show where the sections started.) ...more

Wingspan 8.52 m (28 ft. 6 in.); Length 7.63 m (25 ft. 6 in.); Height 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in); Weight 326 kg (720 lb.), was the most famous and successful of several classic airplanes that emerged during the summer of 1909, when all Europe seemed to be taking to the sky.

Louis Blériot, a French engineer and manufacturer of automobile head lamps and other accessories, first became interested in aeronautics in 1901, when he constructed an experimental ornithopter. During the next eight years he moved through a series of ten distinct aircraft designs, only one of which was capable of making a flight of more than ten minutes.
Blériot's next effort, the Type XI, was designed primarily by engineer Raymond Saulnier, but it was a natural evolution from earlier Blériot aircraft and one to which Blériot himself made substantial contributions. It was first flown at Issy-les-Moulineaux, a military parade ground-turned-flying-field, on January 23, 1909. Further trials and various modifications proceeded through the spring. By the end of May, the Type XI was fitted with a 25-horsepower, three-cylinder Anzani engine, and throughout the remainder of the spring and summer Blériot was flying with regular success. The Anzani was somewhat crude, but it had a reputation for reliability, which was critical to Blériot's next challenge.

Blériot achieved immortality in the Type XI on July 25, 1909, when he made the first airplane crossing of the English Channel, covering the 40 kilometers between Calais and Dover in 36 minutes, 30 seconds. It was not the longest flight to date either in duration or distance. But the symbolic impact of conquering the Channel by airplane made it the most widely acclaimed flight before Lindbergh. For the effort, Blériot captured the London Daily Mail prize of $2,500 that had been put up by the newspaper the year before for any successful cross-Channel airplane flight. Blériot's original Type XI today is in the possession of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

In the afterglow of the Channel flight, Blériot received the first of many orders for copies of his Type XI monoplane. Variants of the original 1909 machine were produced by the Blériot firm, foreign licensees, and enthusiastic amateur builders in Europe and America into World War I. Hundreds were built. Many of the leading aviators of the day flew Blériot aircraft. ...more

Frenchman Louis Blériot had been intrigued by the possibility of flight ever since he attended a 1900 Paris Exhibition featuring experimental flying machines. Over the next few years, Blériot - who had amassed a small fortune manufacturing automobile lights - would spend all his money in his own quest to fly.

Unlike the Wright Brothers and other aviation contemporaries, Blériot didn't take a systematic approach to his flight attempts. Filled with boundless enthusiasm, Blériot spontaneously leaped from one experiment to the next without much planning - or concern for his own safety. Blériot always tested his own planes personally, and his attempts, almost always, ended in crashes.

Over the course of eight years, Blériot built ten planes - all failures. In 1908, when the London Daily Mail offered a cash prize for the first person to cross the English Channel, Blériot was bankrupt, having even spent the last of his wife's inheritance on his passion for flying. As luck would have it, Blériot wife happened to rescue a boy from falling off the balcony of a Paris apartment building. The young boy's appreciative father offered to fund Blériot latest experiment, the Blériot XI.

Blériot collaborated with designer Raymond Saulnier on the plane's construction. As a monoplane, the Blériot XI stood in stark contrast to its more common biplane contemporaries. Its single-wing design reduced drag and weight, enabling the plane greater speed and maneuverability. Lateral balance was aided by the plane's wing warping mechanism - derived from the Wright Flyer.

The Blériot XI made its maiden flight on January 23, 1909. Over the course of the next several months, Blériot worked to improve the plane's performance. He made several modifications, including the addition of a 25-horsepower Anzani engine. Although the engine was rudimentary, it was known to be dependable - crucial if Blériot was to achieve his goal of crossing the English Channel.

In the early morning of July 25, 1909, Blériot set out across the Channel. Without any navigational instruments, Blériot somehow managed to make his way from Calais to Dover in just over 36 minutes. He spotted a French reporter who had promised to identify a suitable landing area by waving a large French flag. Sixty feet off the ground, Blériot thrust the plane down for a hard landing. Emerging from the wreckage, Blériot's only injury was a burned foot that had been sustained days earlier. Instantly, Blériot and his plane received worldwide acclaim.

Soon Blériot opened a factory to produce copies of the Blériot XI. Hundreds of orders came streaming in from around the world. Some of the best known-aviators of the time flew Blériot's planes, including Harriet Quimby who would cross the English Channel three years after Blériot. The Blériot XI's single pair of wings would serve as the new model from which future planes were derived.

The original Anzani Moteurs d'Aviation was situated at 112 Boulevard de Courbevoie, Courbevoie, Paris and was established in 1907. The British Anzani Engine Company (it's name was changed to the British Anzani Engineering Company on February 18th 1927 when it was registered as a private company) was an agency of the original French operation and the first premises were established on November 20th 1912 in Scrubbs Lane, Willesden, London NW10.

The first executive of the company was it's general manager Mr A.M. Ramsay (who was later also MD of the British Caudron aircraft company of Cricklewood and Alloa from 1914-24). It was part of General Aviation Contractors Ltd. a company which had been established in 1911 under Mr Ridley Prentice to supply aircraft and spares for the emerging British aviation market and which already had the agency for the French Anzani motors.

From 1927 the US Anzani agent was a company called Brownback Motor Laboratories Inc, of 1038 Graybar Building, New York. Like the British company they made their own modifications to the engines which included changing the ignition and lubricating systems, the valves, rocker arms and piston designs.

British Anzani was then solely concerned with making aero engines which were sold from the salesrooms of General Aviation Contractors in Regent Street, London and constructed by Coventry Ordnance Works Ltd., an engineering company known for their contract engineering skills.

You could purchase a 25-30hp Anzani 3 cylinder for £172, a 40-45hp 6 cylinder radial was £300, a 50-60hp radial was £372, a 70-75hp 10 cylinder radial cost £500 or the 100hp 10 cylinder radial was £600. The 120 degree radial 3 cylinder was an uprated version of the original Blériot motor bored out to 120 x 130mm (35hp) while the 45hp radial was a two row machine (the first of it's kind) made by basically placing a second 3 cylinder motor behind the first at 60 degree rotation for equal cooling (likewise the 10 cylinder machines were 2 x 5 cylinder configuration).

The production numbers were relatively small (125 engines were produced between 1914-1918) and during the Great War they were used mainly in British Caudron GIII and GIV trainers. The engine designs didn't alter drastically through this period although pushrod inlet valves were introduced and water cooling was tried, but reliability was always a problem.